sound Typical payment for song clips?

B

Boz Uriel

I need to cover some boring parts of a round of golf and I want to liven up the space between important dialog with '70's songs clips. Top 40 stuff. Like a ball rolling too fast toward the water would get a short clip of Player's "Baby Come Back" song. My question is, I like the idea of doing more than more one of these, or possibly having the main character just talk the lines.

So my question is, what is the typical payment for a clip of a '70's pop song? And would it be less (or free due to public domain laws) if the character just spoke the lines?

Thanks for any help on this. :)
 
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It's a script where three young boys get a life lesson from a 45-ish road scholar during a round of golf. There's a sex lesson when the cart girl shows up. There's an honesty lesson when one of the boys is caught cheating. There's a life lesson to be taken out of the whole life is like golf metaphor. I'm staying away from anything Caddieshack-esk or Tin Cup-ish. This will be (hopefully) something fresh.

So at some point I have to have a montage of the foursome playing golf because showing all four hours of a round of golf is just plain no fun to watch. And during the montage I wanted to have some fun with music too. And since the guy is 45 I figured some old 70's hits, just small parts of popular songs that have a double meaning when you watch what's going on screen. Something like I mentioned with the "Baby Come Back" song as you watch his chip roll too far past the hole.
 
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well its the life of the songwriter plus 70years only after that can the song be put in public domain. In case of joint works thats songs written by two or more songwriters, Its the after the last surviving songwriter dies plus 70 years! I read some were that the creators of the Blair Witch Project wanted to use a Rolling Stones song and would have had to pay $250,000 . It would be cheaper to find a composer or an unknown band that sounds like they are from the 70's
 
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We used two sources for music, www.sounddogs.com and www.themusicbakery.com but there are plenty of those types of services, just google royalty free music. They have a variety of costs, I'd say we typically paid $40 for a minute of music and we passed on stuff that sounded great but cost $100 or more. It added up, probably spent $500 on a relatively few songs, all instumentals.

What you cant' ever get is The Rolling Stones. You type a term like 70's metal ballad and up pops selections, you can listen to short clips. Or John Williams intro or Omen themes or any number of things like that. With no budget and no pull, we pretty quickly realized we'd have to use generic stuff that fit. We weren't worried about being sued, too small to be noticed (for now!) but if you use any copyright stuff without permission, you'll never get into any festivals or get touched by any distributors.

I strongly suspect that if you quote lyrics, you gotta pay someone. A character could probably say "Baby, come back!" but not follow it up with "Any kind of fool could see I was wrong to ever live without you."
 
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Ahh the joys of copyright. I understand that you can't use a current artists song without permission, but is it legal to use a full length Beethoven song in a film if a person records their own copy of the song and gives you the rights?
 
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is it legal to use a full length Beethoven song in a film if a person records their own copy of the song and gives you the rights?
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Yes.

There is a difference, though, between you/friend recording your version of a Beethoven tune... and simply ripping a copy of the 1992 Los Angeles Philharmonic's recording of it.

While Beethoven's tunes are well into the public domain, that orchestral recording/interpretation by the LAP is their new creation. You are still welcome to try your own hand at it, mind you.

In a crappy short film I made last year, during a piano-playing scene I played some Mozart. Didn't sound as good as a professional recording, but it was legal. :cool:

or even whistle some 70' song or any others which are copyrighted, I would be charged?
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Well... if the melody is recognisable, there is potential for problems.

The odds of getting busted? Hard to say. The more exposure the film gets, the more likely for problems. Having said that... the odds of the film getting any exposure (via almost any legit medium) are virtually nil, if you can't document permission to use it.

:)

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By the way... if you really have to use a specific song, you can always just ask for free permission. You never know 'til you try.

My brother just did this a few weeks ago... he mailed a letter to Richard O'Brien, and received back a hand-written letter granting permission to use what was asked for, for all time.

There have been other people on the board here, who have written about having done the same thing, too. Some received a free pass for life, others received an X-years permission, others were granted the useage as long as it wasn't commercial, etc. Well... some got laughed at too... but the point is, you don't know 'til you try.

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If you can't get legit permission, here's a few options.

1) There are several places you can buy "generic" era-sounding royalty-free tracks from. Some are actually quite good.

2) SoundTracks has a cheap programme that lets you do that anytime. Dial in the duration you want, and it can generate (no vocals) pretty much anything you want. They are constantly expanding their collections, too. (Downside is paying the initial cost of the sound-files, for each theme)

3) Find a musician on the boards here that can do the job, and also create something original. There are more composers in the Classifieds section of the forum than you can shake a stick at.

Of course, these three options don't help with you needing a specific song to work as a punchline/gag the way you explain it... good options, though.

_______

:cool:
 
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